Whoever wields the sword will die by the sword.
Hello everyone, yesterday I saw a news that made people laugh and cry, so let's talk about it briefly.
A picture of an advertisement painting of the Nanning subway was reported two days ago, and the whistleblower was a small Internet celebrity on Douyin, who posted a video saying that the "Japanese military flag pattern" appeared in the passage of Tinghong Road Station of Nanning Metro Line 2, which was ill-intentioned.
Then the matter exploded, just looking at the deliberately selected part of the video, coupled with the Internet celebrity's emotional commentary, you may think that it is somewhat similar to the outline of the Japanese military flag. But the problem is that according to the panorama released by the official afterwards, you will find that this advertising painting looks like this-
Yes, it's clear that the image that sparked the association was just a deliberate, even malicious, screenshot. The advertising wall of Nanning Metro does not actually have any meaning of "summoning the soul of Japanese militarism", and the theme of people is to promote traditional Chinese culture, which is very positive.
But what is even more interesting is the official handling afterwards: after a good-natured explanation that he absolutely did not mean that, the subway company said that it had immediately removed the advertising paintings, and said that it would "further improve the level of advertising management" in the future.
I think at this moment, the planners of the advertisement must have 10,000 grass and mud horses running through in their hearts - improve a Nima to improve the difficulty of making a positive energy plan, is it easy for me? The advertising case also had to be redone. Who did I recruit and who did I mess with?
Coincidentally, the teacher Hu Xijin may also be in his heart recently, and he may also be on Douyin, and some videos of the same copywriting have recently been circulated, and everyone is scolding him as a "well-known leader".
The reason is simply - some time ago in Japan, in the face of the question of "do the Japanese deserve it", which was noisy on the Internet, editor-in-chief Hu Xijin continued his usual style, saying that the people who gloated about the earthquake on our side are "understandable", but he personally sympathizes with the earthquake disaster in Japan.
Recently, he said something for Dr. Sun, who is wandering in the United States, "you can't equate American citizenship with treason" and the like.
These statements have caused a lot of trouble, because if you are not satisfied with Editor-in-Chief Hu merely "understanding" them, you can say what kind of position you have! What? You actually sympathize with the Japanese? You still speak for Dr. Sun? Then you are a traitor, a traitor, a thief, and a well-known leader.
Poor editor-in-chief Hu, if my impression is correct, he should be the first wave of people on the Chinese Internet to criticize others with the hat of "public knowledge", but I didn't expect to criticize for so many years, getting old, and finally I couldn't avoid being shot to death on the beach by the "back waves". To say that he is like Shang Ying "self-killing" feels a bit like Teacher Hu, but this is already the second apt metaphor I can think of.
The folding fan in the Nanning Metro advertisement and the "well-known leader Hu Xijin", these two traffic topics recently contributed by Douyin, seem to be not the same thing, but they seem to have a lot of similarities.
For example, I'm curious about the psychological state of the broadcaster who posted these two videos - let's talk about the guy who took a folding fan to make the feeling of the Rising Sun Flag. You say, a serious person, who is idle and has nothing to do when he enters the subway station and doesn't catch the train, takes a magnifying glass everywhere to find flaws in the advertising paintings, and as long as he sees a certain part suspected of "insulting China", he will shoot a video and spread it?
Are you the reincarnation of Huang Wenbing in the Water Margin? Are you running a business life and running upstairs in Xunyang every day to find anti-poems?
So I went to see this guy's Douyin (yes, I created such a big rumor, and his number is still there, actually). I found out that this guy is a small Internet celebrity with tens of thousands of fans. As long as he sees other people's words and deeds and pictures suspected of insulting China, he will immediately set a set of big criticisms and make a series of moves, and win a little traffic by inciting emotions.
This business has been quite good for a while, but since about the second half of last year, his updates and browsing have dropped significantly.
On the one hand, it is estimated that his audience is aesthetically fatigued, and it is really not interesting to see him shouting slogans like this every day.
On the other hand, these videos, words and deeds that are easy to trigger "insulting China" associations in China have been seriously depleted under the rotation of these "patriotic" Internet celebrities to "mine". Dalian's "Japanese Style Street" was closed, and the young ladies in Suzhou did not dare to wear kimonos (even Hanfu) to walk on the streets publicly. A few days ago, Christmas, these people wanted to stir up a wave of "boycott Christmas" heat. But how to say it? Compared with the anti-Japanese topic, the audience base of the criticism of Christmas is still smaller. Of course, for those relatively large self-media who eat this bowl of rice, this topic is hot enough, but for this kind of self-media with tens of thousands of fans, that bit of traffic is not enough to make a living.
So I guess this guy is also helpless, recently wandering around the street all day to "find a topic", may have accidentally seen the advertising wall of the Nanning subway - okay! You are the step of my turn over and fight for the explosion!
Following this line of thought, you can also understand why Editor-in-Chief Hu can be branded as a "well-known leader" by saying "I sympathize with the earthquake in Japan".
It's not that Editor-in-Chief Hu has changed his position, it's just that there are too many self-media eating populist traffic in China, and under the crazy excavation of various masters in the past two years, the "public knowledge" that can be used for criticism is almost extinct. But they still have to do business, then Mr. Hu, I'm sorry, you can barely make a "public knowledge" cameo. Who makes you want to talk about common sense like you said yourself?
Borrowing your head in exchange for my traffic, populist business has always been so cruel. It's just that now it's involuted to the head of Editor-in-Chief Hu and the subway Zhengneng advertisement.
This phenomenon reminds me of what I learned when I studied evolution in college:
In the 19th century, there was a debate between Lamarckism and Darwinism, both branches of evolutionary theory. Lamarckists argue that simple survival of the fittest cannot explain why evolution would be a continuous process.
For example, a giraffe's longer neck can be interpreted as a mutation, but why is it so old?
To put it simply, the ancestors of giraffes "stretched" their necks and legs in order to reach the leaves in high places.
But this argument was refuted by Darwinism, who offered a more subtle, but also brutal, picture of evolution:
Africa's savanna was not what it is today from the beginning, but because of environmental changes such as climate drought. The trees are a little thinner than they used to be. But the resulting food shortages left the shorter giraffe relatives starving to death, while the giraffe's ancestors survived because they were slightly taller than their counterparts and could eat taller young leaves.
Then, when their species explodes and eats up all the young leaves at this height, the giraffe ancestors who are a little taller than these species gain a survival advantage again, knocking out the shorter ones.
This process repeats itself and continues until the giraffe reaches a limit.
This evolutionary model, which is currently thought to be correct, is intriguingly terrifying in that in a closed environment, the environment only needs to complete the "first push" (such as the food shortage caused by drought or the emergence of herbaceous plants), and organisms will naturally evolve in an extreme direction, and in the process actively modify the environment itself to accelerate this evolution.
A similar story, in fact, Liu Cixin also told it in "The Three-Body Problem":
In Da Liu's fictional world, the universe originally had eleven macroscopic dimensions, but in order to compete for survival resources, civilization invented the "dimensionality reduction strike", a big killer that lacks virtue and smokes, thus opening a terrifying "dark forest", and the more "open-minded" civilization does not hesitate to let its own life transform itself into a two-dimensional creature and "dry up the water in the sea and run from one dark forest to another".
This phenomenon is known in evolution as the "law of the left wall" - a drunken man staggering down a road with a wall very close to the left and a ditch far away on the right, if he walks down the road and randomly steps to the left or right, he will sooner or later fall into the ditch on the right.
Because in this "evolutionary model", one direction of evolution is sealed by the environment, and in the process of random evolution, species will sooner or later go to the opposite extreme.
For example, in the savanna of Africa, the "left wall" of giraffe evolution is to die of growth, but it can live safely when it grows taller, so giraffes will desperately grow taller, and constantly set up new "left wall of evolution", eliminating those who are not tall enough, and stretching their bodies to the limit that their functions cannot bear.
In Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem", the left wall of evolution is: unwilling to give up high-dimensional creatures means facing the existential danger of extinction, while wanton using creatures that give up high-dimensional can use "dimensionality reduction strikes" to gain safety. Then the creatures that want to survive will desperately reduce themselves to a lower dimension, falling from the eleventh dimension all the way to the three-dimensional, two-dimensional or even one-dimensional, because "it is better than death".
So as long as there is a "first push", the rest is that life completes "love and kill" in evolution on its own - oh no, in this evolved Shura field, there is no love, only killing.
Using this theory of evolution, to understand the two news stories that are like jokes in the previous article, you will find that everything is easy to explain, and you can't laugh. At present, there are also some left walls in the field of public opinion, for example, no matter how you say, as long as you put on the banner of "patriotism", you can get a relatively "safe" talisman.
You see that in these two incidents, the little Internet celebrity who "took the screenshot to take the meaning" was obviously framing Nanning Metro, but the result of the collision was that Nanning Metro obediently withdrew the advertisement and "apologized".
And Mr. Hu Xijin, who was scolded as a "well-known leader", has not replied to the person who buttoned the hat so far, and I estimate that he is eighty percent afraid to confront the group of people who want to "bring down" him - although everyone should remember that once upon a time, Hu always liked to start a debate with the "public knowledge" in his mouth.
But do you see that in the past few years, has he ever talked back to those who say that he is a well-known or even a well-known leader? Anyway, I haven't seen it.
I don't think it's accurate to say that this is "I'd rather offend a gentleman than mess with a villain". A more reasonable explanation is that he is as shrewd as Nanning Metro, and knows that the gang of people who are looking for them do not talk about logic, do not talk about the bottom line, and are not easy to provoke, so they can only retreat.
And the picture that the law of the left wall ultimately describes is actually very terrifying, because it describes a "world where everyone is injured" - in nature, there is a limit to the growth and height of giraffes due to objective reasons of physiological structure.
But in the field of public opinion, there is no limit to the polarization of voices. The act of cutting off a piece of a folding fan as a flag of the rising sun seems absurd to us today. But if the person who does this kind of thing can be safely not refuted, not punished, or even safely earn traffic. Soon, like the overbreeding of dominant species, this behavior will be "over-copied" by their traffic-anxious peers — which is why the well-known "copywriting video" scolding Hu Xijin has become popular.
Because it's safe and profitable to do so.
When the whole network is flooded with a large number of works that imitate this kind of behavior, its audience will once again appear to be ugly and fatigued, and the author will once again cause a shortage of targets and topics. We will definitely see that some people will "evolve" again and come up with new and strange critical angles - for example, those who say that Editor-in-Chief Hu is "public knowledge" may one day be criticized as "public knowledge" by the new generation of "Hou Lang".
Again, this trend is "a world where everyone is wounded" – the so-called "whoever wields the sword will die by the sword". If you rely on extreme positions, sooner or later you will encounter people who are more extreme than you and use your head to fight for his fame. And if you want to fight in this dark forest, you have to be willing to transform yourself into a one-dimensional creature that is not afraid of any dimensionality reduction blows.
And if we want to break this curse, we must break down the left wall - maintain social tolerance, so that those voices who rationally criticize these extreme arguments can speak boldly and be heard by more people.
In yesterday's article, I talked about the meaning of my writing (I had no intention of convincing them to write just to prevent them from assimilating me), and maybe, this is also one of the purposes - if a society wants to stay calm, it needs someone to be brave and reverse it, and pull public opinion back to a state of reconciliation.
At the end of the article, I will worry a little more about the national brand Huawei - because I see that some netizens have concocted the same method and made such a screenshot of its trademark:
Of course, I believe that this screenshot, at least for now, is just a joke to remind everyone not to go up.
It's just that I'm worried that if this trend continues, there will always be people who don't use it as a joke to fight for their own wealth.
After all, the phrase "dare to laugh at Huang Chao's husband" is just a whining joke after Song Jiang got drunk.
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